Then they requested copies of the coverage from the various
companies and law enforcement organizations owning the cameras
through the British Data Protection Act, and got enough to use.
They even managed closeups.

October 31, 2007

Although our reporter was not the winning bidder, the seller contacted us and claimed the winner had failed to pay. She then quoted a price of £2,400 and said she would post the tickets to our reporter.

But we had already contacted the winning bidder via Ebay; he told us that he had already transferred £2,414 to the seller's bank account.

October 17, 2007

RIAA demonstrates how not only to alienate customers by suing them,
but to lose money while doing so:

During an occasionally testy cross examination,
a Sony executive said what many observers have suspected for a long
time. The RIAA's four-year-old lawsuit campaign is costing the music
industry millions of dollars and is a big money-loser for the record
labels. The revelation came during the first day of Capitol Records
v. Jammie Thomas, the first file-sharing case to go to trial (it was
formerly known as Virgin v. Thomas, but the sole Virgin Records track was
stricken from the complaint, making Capitol Records the lead plaintiff).

September 25, 2007

It's great for email, but it can never work for movies, TV shows or music, because in the case of "copy protection" the receiver is also the person that the system is meant to guard itself against.

Say I sell you an encrypted DVD: the encryption on the DVD is supposed to stop you (the DVD's owner) from copying it. In order to do that, it tries to stop you from decrypting the DVD.

Except it has to let you decrypt the DVD some of the time. If you can't decrypt the DVD, you can't watch it. If you can't watch it, you won't buy it. So your DVD player is entrusted with the keys necessary to decrypt the DVD, and the film's creator must trust that your DVD player is so well-designed that no one will ever be able to work out the key.

With great power comes great responsibility, and apparently with DRM-free
music comes files embedded with identifying information. Such is the
situation with Apple's new DRM-free music: songs sold without DRM still
have a user's full name and account e-mail embedded in them, which means
that dropping that new DRM-free song on your favorite P2P network could
come back to bite you.

We started examining the files this morning and noticed our names and
e-mail addresses in the files, and we've found corroboration of the
find at TUAW, as well. But there's more to the story: Apple embeds your
account information in all songs sold on the store, not just DRM-free
songs. Previously it wasn't much of a big deal, since no one could imagine
users sharing encrypted, DRMed content. But now that DRM-free music from
Apple is on the loose, the hidden data is more significant since it could
theoretically be used to trace shared tunes back to the original owner. It
must also be kept in mind that this kind of information could be spoofed.

The ars technica article goes on to recommend a trivial way to keep
the music and ditch the identifiers, and points out that the presence
of such an identifier on somebody else's disk doesn't necessarily
prove copyright infringement.
But maybe that's not what Apple is really after.
Maybe it's so people will know that Apple could know,
and other people could know, where you got your music.
Like French chefs know where other chefs got certain recipes.
Norms-based iTunes?

May 15, 2007

After many earlier rounds of saber-rattling and FUD, Microsoft has
announced that Free Software users -- including everyone who, like me,
uses Ubuntu Linux -- are violating at least 235 of Microsoft's patents,
though they don't say which ones. Microsoft are now threatening end users
of GNU/Linux (that's you and me again) with lawsuits unless we pay them
protection money. "Nice operating system you got there, it'd be a shame
if something were to happen to it."

The Microsoft position is this: even if you don't use Windows, you still
have to pay them as much money as they would have gotten for selling
you a copy of it.

April 09, 2007

In an Op-Ed about the demise of albums and record stores and the
rise of the downloaded single:

The sad thing is that CDs and downloads could have coexisted peacefully
and profitably. The current state of affairs is largely the result of
shortsightedness and boneheadedness by the major record labels and the
Recording Industry Association of America, who managed to achieve the
opposite of everything they wanted in trying to keep the music business
prospering. The association is like a gardener who tried to rid his lawn
of weeds and wound up killing the trees instead.

September 22, 2006

"...almost all labels were owned by one of five companies:
BMG, EMI, Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group,
and Warner Music Group. A new emphasis on quarterly results
discouraged label executives from nurturing new bands and
focusing on long-term development."

The article is mostly about Nettwerk, a record label that
leaves copyright to the actual artists, while it handles
distribution in multiple formats (CD, iPoD, ringtones, P2P networks,
YouTube, etc., along with promotion of concerts and radio play).

Many of us have heard this Led Zeppelin song a thousand times
without knowing what it's about.
Memphis Minnie is listed as one of the songwriters because she originally wrote the song,
back in 1927, after the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927,
which displaced 700,000 people permanently and probably got Herbert Hoover elected president.

Jared Diamond: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or SucceedThe author examines societies from the smallest (Tikopia) to the largest (China) and why they have succeeded or failed, where failure has included warfare, poverty, depopulation, and complete extinction. He thought he could do this purely through examining how societies damaged their environments, but discovered he also had to consider climate change, hostile neighbors, trading partners, and reactions of the society to all of those, including re-evaluating how the society's basic suppositions affect survival in changed conditions.